1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for distributing software. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method, apparatus, and computer instructions for performing autonomic event triggered auto-configuration or install based on previously installed products.
2. Description of Related Art
As the size of an enterprise or business continues to grow, the number of workstations within the enterprise or business continues to increase. The task of managing configuration of these workstations becomes more complex for administrators, since configuration of mission-critical applications has to be under close control as the vendor updates versions of software. In addition, safe and efficient deployment of applications without disrupting productivity and security of deployment becomes very important. Inventory reports on assets of workstations also are needed in order to maintain accurate license information.
Conventionally, installation of software products is performed by a user of the workstation. The installation is performed by a user who manually pulls the software product from a central server on a local area network or from the Internet. Local client installer software normally triggers the installation upon user's request to install a particular software package or application. When the user requests a particular software package or application, authentication and authorization is performed on the user workstation before the installation to verify the identity of the user. However, the local installer software does not save away the settings of the previous installs in any form for future installation on the same client.
Furthermore, installation information answered by the user that is not specific to the user, for example server hostname and port number, is not recorded in any way to be reused for future installation. To the contrary, most existing installation utility discards the information entered by the user once the installation is complete. When a successful installation is completed, the existing installation utility does not register the newly installed product to allow discovery of the product in future installations of other products. This discovery helps to control the inventory of the software products distributed among the workstations.
During normal business operations, when a new employee joins a department of the organization, new software products are needed for the new employee. An administrator manually gathers a profile to determine what type of software products are necessary for the new employee to perform the job. The installation information is often not included in the profile. As a result, the underlying details of the installation, such as software version of the installed product, may be overlooked. In addition, if multiple deployments are required to install products on multiple machines. This task becomes even more cumbersome for administrator to perform.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method, apparatus, and computer instructions for performing autonomic event triggered auto-configuration or install based on previously installed products by detecting an event that indicates a software module is to be installed on the client workstations so that a push may be scheduled on the client workstation to later pull the software module from the installation server.